Technology As Innovator

Yahoo! Singapore country manager in Vietnam confirmed: Yahoo! 360 will be closed in April 2009.

Yahoo! 360 is hosting more than 4 millions accounts, 2 millions of which are from Vietnam. The service has been very buggy for more than a year and development was ceased.

Yahoo! introduced Yahoo! 360Plus Vietnam with Vietnamese interface in April 2008. A utility to migrate part of data from 360 to 360Plus Vietnam has been provided.

Local players from Vietnam are in a race to win users dropping out of 360. Meanwhile, Facebook Vietnamese interface is going to be launched.

If you use Yahoo! 360, where do you plan to move your social graph (connections) to?

Addenda

1. Yahoo! 360plus Vietnam is expected to be integrated into Yahoo! Profiles in April 2009.

Private-owned high school Ngoi Sao (translated as Star) was probably the first non-international school in Ho Chi Minh City to provide edu email to their students. Read the story here

First, since the capacity is 7Gb, I have reason to believe that the school’s IT utilizes Gmail service.

Second, providing students with the school email address makes it more professional for communication than a personal mailbox on a free service. The students can use their school email to apply for part-time or free-lance job.

Third, I wonder if there is any difference between email addresses of students and email addresses of the school’s staff?

Last but not least, maybe these students can use their edu email as credentials to join a network on Facebook, instead of the current introduction mechanism.

How to join a network on Facebook

1. Location-based network has no restriction

2. For organization-based network, members must have an email address belonging to their company / organization where they find the verification link from Facebook

3. High schools also have their networks, but since many high school don’t provide school email, joining process is done on introduction basis. Person A requests network N to which s/he belongs. When person B who is a member of that network in real life want to join N, B has to add A as a friend and asks A to confirm that B is actually in N before Facebook adds B to N. Then C shall have to add either A or B and ask for confirmation. This process goes on for subsequent members…

Recently Yahoo!’s strategy has been questioned when they declined to sell to Microsoft or offered their market-leading product Yahoo! Answers.

On product level, although Yahoo! lost 0-4 on social media, the company still has the advantage their teams can take advantage of: branding power and customer loyalty. And they can exploit the advantage to boost their product engagement simply by cloning other services.

For example, Tu has really sharp eyes when he noticed the hints of Yahoo!’s next products: they might try to clone Blogger or Facebook.

In fact, Yahoo!’s recent blogging platform for Hongkong and Vietnam imitated different features from Facebook (friend tagging), WordPress, Windows Live Spaces or Twitter (”Follow” concept under the old name “Add friend”).

With the new Facebook design disliked by somewhat millions users, Yahoo! can attempt to win back their user base by cloning only the simplest features (of course, less effective in data mining) of an advanced social network to target the non-tech-savvy users.

When innovation like Yahoo! Platform still has a long way to go, doing quick fixes on simple things might help Yahoo! in their identity crisis.